Hyderabad: The monkey menace has escalated beyond urban and temple towns and is impacting rural areas and causing widespread distress among farmers. Apart from horticultural crops, monkeys are not attacking like maize and paddy crops.
In many villages, hundreds of monkeys descend on farms, eat some parts of the fruits and leave the rest. The destruction is so severe that some farmers have stopped cultivating certain crops or have abandoned farming.
Maize cultivation farmers in the erstwhile united Khammam district, particularly from Medipally, Mudigonda, Enkoor, Tallada, Bonakal, and Raghunadhapalem, have incurred huge losses in the last Rabi season. Monkeys typically attack maize crops, which are around 3 to 4 months old.
The traditional and unconventional attempts adopted by farmers to scare monkeys — using langurs, sound systems, wearing animal masks, etc. — have failed, because monkeys have started raiding the crops in large troops numbering in the hundreds.
Some farmers have hired guards, but they too failed to deter the monkey raids on crops.
Narrating a major incident, Kandula Bhaskara Rao, a farmer from Venkatapuram village in Mudigonda mandal, said that over 500 monkeys attacked maize crops belonging to a farmer. When the farmer couple rushed to the village to bring more people to scare them away, the monkeys damaged crop in the entire 1.5-acre field within two hours. “They damaged many times the crops than they ate,” Bhaskara Rao said.
Pointing out that farmers are now more concerned about monkeys than unseasonal rains and hailstorms, Bhaskara Rao said the monkeys had even started damaging paddy crops when they reach the ripening stage. Farmers cultivating mango, guava, and subabul, which are major crops in the district, are also badly affected by the monkey menace, he added.
Farmer union leader Battu Purushottam said that farmers have incurred heavy losses over about one lakh acres in the united Khammam district. He urged the government to come to the rescue of farmers by adopting population control measures to check the growing number of monkeys.
He said the expanding granite industry in the district is another major reason for monkeys shifting to rural areas, as the industry has led to massive cutting down of trees.
Telangana Farmers Commission chairman M. Kodanda Reddy observed that solar fencing of farmland was the only solution to check the monkey menace though it is costly.
Since monkeys are associated with the religious sentiments, taking serious measures is difficult. He said the government would try to provide subsidies to farmers to install solar fencing in major affected areas of the state from next year.
The Telangana High Court had recently taken suo motu cognisance of the issue following a PIL based on a letter from the Telangana Rythu Samasyala Sadhana Samithi and directed the state government to outline the steps it has taken to curb the growing monkey menace. The government was urged to consider planting fruit-bearing trees in forest areas to relocate monkeys and to set up compensation schemes for affected farmers.
